4

Does Secularism Equal Atheism?

Secularism leaves the mystery of deity to the chartered imagi-

nation of man, and does not attempt to close the door of the fu-
ture, but holds that the desert of another existence belongs only
to those who engage in the service of man in this life.
—George Jacob Holyoake, English Secularism

American secul arism has lost control of its identity and image.
That’s because the equation secularism = atheism is rapidly gaining
market share. It is increasingly employed in popular usage, political
analysis, and even scholarly discourse. This formula is muscling out
an infinitely more accurate understanding of secularism as a political
philosophy about how the state should relate to organized religion.1
If this association prevails, if secularism simply becomes a synonym
for atheism, then secularism in the United States will go out of busi-
ness.
Which is fine by the Revivalists and which may account for why
they perpetuate this confusion. In these circles secularism has be-
come another word for godlessness. As one journalist perceptively
observes, “secular” is a “code in conservative Christian circles for
‘atheist’ or even ‘God-hating’ . . . conjur[ing], in a fresh way, all the
demons Christian conservatives have been fighting for more than 30
years: liberalism, sexual permissiveness, and moral lassitude.”2
Not only foes draw this link, but friends as well. The website of the
Secular Coalition for America describes the group as “a 501(c)4 advo-
cacy organization whose purpose is to amplify the diverse and grow-
ing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States.”3 This

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 54   What Secularism Is and Isn’t

community, it points out, is comprised of “atheists, agnostics, human-

ists, freethinkers, and other nontheistic Americans.”4 An affiliated or-
ganization, the Secular Student Alliance, refers to its mission as “to
organize and empower nonreligious students around the country.”5
Why must so-called secular organizations be focused exclusively
on nonbelievers? After all, just a few decades back, in secularism’s
mild separationist golden age, all sorts of religious believers could
have been categorized as secularists. The term could refer to a Bap-
tist, a Jew, a progressive Catholic, a Unitarian, and so on. Also, there
were secular identities that didn’t make any reference to a person’s
religious belief or lack thereof. A secularist might just as likely have
been a public school teacher, a journalist, a civil rights activist, a pro-
fessor, a Hollywood mogul, a civil libertarian, a pornographer, and so
forth. From the 1940s to the 1980s all of the aforementioned groups
mobilized on behalf of secular causes, the most prominent being sep-
aration of church and state.
Aside from being preposterously imprecise, the equation secu-
larism = atheism gravely undermines the potential of secularism as
a political movement. It leaves people of faith with little incentive
to buy in and reduces secularism’s personnel to the size of the tiny
American atheist movement.6
This equation poses a serious public relations problem as well.
The atheist movement is not just small, but it is also among the least
popular groups in the United States.7 A survey in 2007 found that re-
spondents viewed nonbelievers more unfavorably than any other co-
hort they were asked about. This included Muslims, whom the athe-
ists somehow edged out by eighteen percentage points.8 If atheists
are perceived to “own” secularism, its approval ratings will plummet
even further.
This is certainly not the fault of atheists, the vast majority of whom
are tolerant, self-critical, and moderate in their outlook (that is, sec-
ularish). And were a true secular movement to be forged, it should
make the eradication of anti-atheist prejudice integral to its plat-
form. The fact remains, however, that the more secularism becomes
narrowly equated with atheism, the less it will be able to forge coali-
tions and pursue its agenda effectively.
Which brings us, then, to the aforementioned impending bank-

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 Does Secularism Equal Atheism?   55

ruptcy. The growing popularity of the secularism = atheism equa-

tion has to do with the advent of a group known as the New Athe-
ists. Incensed by the political and cultural might of the Revivalists,
this movement crashed into the public square in 2004.9 The result
included enviable book sales, preposterous polemics, and the almost
overnight development of a national media platform.10
Yet instead of honing their powers of critique on anti-secular Re-
vivalists, the New Atheists advanced a mixed-martial-arts assault on
religion in general. They gleefully (and catastrophically) set about
pitting nonbelievers against all believers. They thus included in their
onslaught the one constituency in whose hands the future of secular-
ism lies: religious moderates. The New Atheist creed maintains that
moderates are just as dangerous and misguided as their extremist co-
religionists.
Here is Sam Harris, offering his characteristically subtle take on
the question: “Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible
for the religious conflicts in our world, because their beliefs provide
the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can
never be adequately opposed.”11 Richard Dawkins, in The God Delu-
sion, includes a self-explanatory section titled “How ‘Moderation’
in Faith Fosters Fanaticism.” “Even mild and moderate religion,” he
avers, “helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism nat-
urally flourishes.”12 Surely a school of thought that can’t distinguish
between a member of the Taliban beheading a journalist and a Meth-
odist running a soup kitchen in Cincinnati is not poised to make the
sound policy decisions that accrue to the good of secularism.
The precise relation of atheism to secularism needs to be teased
out and explained to the general public. This is actually an old di-
lemma, one that was debated a century and a half ago. There, the
possibility was raised that the passions of extreme atheism tend to
muck up the agenda of secularism.

Secularism Born Again?

Opinions differ as to when secularism was born. One approach fo-

cuses on Christian premodernity and identifies Paul and Augustine

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 56   What Secularism Is and Isn’t

as having laid down the initial tracks of the secular vision. The sec-
ond, which is preferable, points to the high-speed thought corridor
that stretched from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. It was
there, in early modernity, that the Luther-Locke-Jefferson line car-
ried the secular vision into the sunlight of Reason.
Others, however, identify a completely different starting point: the
winter of 1851, when the Englishman George Jacob Holyoake (1817–
1906) recalls having coined the word secularism (his contribution
being the suffixing of that -ism onto the word secular). He shared
that recollection in a book written forty-five years later, so, unless his
memory was flawless, perhaps we should not canonize the precise
date.13 Suffice it to say that secularism experienced a third and auspi-
cious birth sometime during the mid-nineteenth century.
For some it is Holyoake, not Jefferson, nor Locke, nor Luther, who
is the true father of secularism. And if secularism suffers from a def-
initional crisis today, let us note in passing that to him must be as-
cribed some responsibility for that as well. In his works, such as The
Principles of Secularism of 1871, he somehow managed to define sec-
ularism in about a dozen different ways.14
This complex figure lived a long and tumultuous life in what must
have been a very interesting era to think outside the confines of Chris-
tianity. The viselike grip of ecclesiastical control was clearly loosen-
ing in Victorian England. This context provided a perfect, though not
necessarily risk-free, environment for Holyoake and countless other
“infidels” to mount a ferocious attack on the status quo.
In his youth, Holyoake was a relentless critic of Christianity. Like
so many Victorian dissenters, he spent time in jail for blasphem-
ing.15 In 1843 he bitterly, but eloquently, recounted the tale of his im-
prisonment in his essay “A Short and Easy Method with the Saints.”
There, the twenty-five-year-old protests that “religion is ever found
the mother of mental prostration, and the right arm of political op-
pression.”16
Holyoake was understandably enraged at having been thrown in
a dungeon for an off-the-cuff poke at Christianity he had made while
taking questions after a lecture. He complained that this religion
forces the concession of “man’s noblest right, the right of expressing
his opinions.”17 “Infidels have never received anything from Chris-

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 Does Secularism Equal Atheism?   57

tians,” he broods, “but calumny, contempt, insult, imprisonment, and

death.”18
As he aged, however, Holyoake’s views would mellow and evolve
in ways that make him difficult to categorize. In his early life he threw
his lot in with atheism, but one scholar sees him drifting to agnosti-
cism in his old age.19 Another writer refers to him as a “lukewarm”
atheist and notes that Holyoake “was sympathetic to religion.”20 He
saw secularism as a worldview or system of ethics that moved to-
ward knowledge of God insofar as it assiduously strived to discover
the truth.21 Holyoake, for his part, endorsed an “atheism of reflec-
tion,” which “listens reverentially for the voice of God, which weighs
carefully the teachings of a thoughtful Theism; but refuses to recog-
nize the officious, incoherent babblement of intolerant or presump-
tuous men.”22
This calls attention to a very important truth about self-professed
atheists in the nineteenth century and most likely today as well:
rather than having a fixed lifelong identity as deniers of God’s exis-
tence, there is a recurrent fluctuation in their thought.23 Individual
atheists change across the course of a lifetime.
Should this be surprising? People change. Theists change. Athe-
ists change. The latter are not godless every minute of their lives. Nor
are the former lacking in doubts. Extreme theists and extreme athe-
ists insist on locking people into one fixed identity. But atheist iden-
tity is always in flux.24 How to be secular? In matters metaphysical,
keep an open mind or, as we shall see later, “don’t get overwrought.”
In any case, Holyoake refined and defended his thought about
secularism across more than a half-century of published work. His
initial comment from 1851, referenced earlier, maintained that “sec-
ular” connoted “principles of conduct, apart from spiritual consid-
erations.”25 Gaining attention and growing in stature, the rising star
would publish a book a few years later called Principles of Secular-
ism.26 There he offered up a plethora of definitions. It is hard to pin-
point which understanding of his subject he preferred, but the fol-
lowing would seem to represent his view well: “Secularism is the
study of promoting human welfare by material means; measuring
human welfare by the utilitarian rule, and making the service of oth-
ers a duty of life. Secularism relates to the present existence of man

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 58   What Secularism Is and Isn’t

. . . [it is] a series of principles intended for the guidance of those who
find Theology indefinite, or inadequate, or deem it unreliable.”27
Holyoake’s sympathetic readers were variously confused, elated,
or angered by this definition. Let’s begin with confusion: a passenger
on the Luther-Locke-Jefferson line might be justifiably flummoxed.
Where is the reference to order? the state? the church? In truth, po-
litical conceptions of secularism were always an afterthought for
Holyoake. He did occasionally contemplate the role of government,
as when he wrote, “The State should forbid no religion, impose no re-
ligion, teach no religion, pay no religion.”28
Ethicists, however, might be elated by a definition that placed
the accent of secularism on moral behavior instead of politics. Holy-
oake, as we have seen, spoke of principles that were to guide secular-
ists, what he called “a code of duty pertaining to this life.”29 Foremost
among them were the following mantra-like propositions: (1) “the
improvement of this life by material means,” (2) “science is the avail-
able Providence of man,” and (3) “it is good to do good.”30
Holyoake’s definition(s) not only stressed ethics, but ethics geared
to the present. “Secularity,” he commented, “draws the line of sepa-
ration between the things of time and the things of eternity. That is
Secular which pertains to this world.”31 The emphasis on ethical ac-
tion in the here and now is constant through all of Holyoake’s think-
ing. Holyoake went so far as to opine, “Giving an account of ourselves
in the whole extent of opinion . . . we should use the word ‘Secularist’
as best indicating that province of human duty which belongs to this
life.”32
Thus far we have encountered two species of definitions of sec-
ularism: the political and the ethical. The political was born of the
Reformation and the Enlightenment. It stresses the relation between
religious institutions and government. Its bearers were our five vi-
sionary architects. The ethical definition was engendered by Holy-
oake and later on we will note its affinities with the thought of Saint
Augustine. We would add, parenthetically, that Holyoake’s approach
has lived a long and healthy life in dictionaries and encyclopedias in
the entry titled “Secularism.” Curiously, many reference books tend
to favor this ethical definition over the older political one that devel-
oped in Christian political philosophy.

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 Does Secularism Equal Atheism?   59

Among those who were chagrined by Holyoake’s approach would

be the small but growing band of Victorian infidels for whom he was
a hero and leader. True, Holyoake would earn their respect by cham-
pioning the cause of freedom of expression (a huge issue for an out-
spoken population that had a knack for getting thrown in the clink).33
But why didn’t his definition reference infidelity or atheism or agnos-
ticism or some such thing?
Holyoake intentionally omitted any reference to atheism in his
definition of secularism. To understand why is to glimpse a credible
alternative to the extreme forms of atheism that are coming to domi-
nate secularism today.

Charles Bradlaugh and the “War Against Religion”

George Jacob Holyoake had a younger, more charismatic, more in-

cendiary, more radical contemporary. A David to his Saul. A Malcolm
X to his Martin Luther King Jr.
His name was Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891) and his biographer
describes him as a “proselytizing atheist” who would shout his un-
belief “from town halls and market squares.”34 Bradlaugh acquired
a well-earned reputation as one of the most angry, uncompromising
atheists in the world.35 He proudly referred to himself as one of the
“rough English skirmishers” in “the great Freethought army.”36 The
famed orator was the first president of the National Secular Society.
Founded in 1866, it was the flagship organization of Victorian infi-
delry.37
Like Holyoake, Bradlaugh had good reason for thinking ill of
Christianity. He too spent time in prison for articulating infidel
thoughts. Worse yet, Bradlaugh was literally thrown out of the very
parliament to which he had been democratically elected. This sad
saga, a sort of national scandal, was drawn out over six years, 1880–
1886. The controversy, which transfixed England, centered on how a
professed atheist could take a religious oath of office.38
In 1870 Bradlaugh and Holyoake held a storied two-night debate
in front of a boisterous audience of freethinkers. The relationship be-
tween the two men was not without its professional and personal an-

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